


Dear Charles

by Magnolie



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff, Love Letters, M/M, Post X-Men: First Class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 16:42:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2435717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magnolie/pseuds/Magnolie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles finds a letter Erik had written the nights before Cuba, when he had still thought that he would leave them all behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dear Charles

**Author's Note:**

> Now, this is my first fanfiction for this fandom and ship EVER. I basically just binge-watached all movies this week, and well, took me less than a second to jump up shouting "SHIP IT LIKE FEDEX" after Charles jumps into the water. When I was walking to Uni today, I had the idea to write this and I hope it's somewhat 'good' and enjoyable :3 Please let me know if it is (not)!

**Dear Charles  
**

 

He had obviously never meant for anybody to ever find it.

He wasn’t sure why he had never thrown it away in all these months, why it was still concealed and hidden in the lowest drawer of his desk. Maybe it was the thought of never saying goodbye properly should he ever leave – out of whatever reason. Maybe he was hoping that sometime he would find the courage to tell Charles all the things he had written down on the three pages of finest Italian stationery the nights before they had flown off to Cuba, or maybe he was just afraid someone would find it in the bin (he didn’t have the heart to burn the yellow envelop that had Charles’ name neatly written in the middle). No one would ever touch his desk, no one ever dared to enter his room, the beautiful suite just a few steps from Charles’ and the small upstairs library that was now mainly home to his German and Hebrew literature.

It had been secure there in his drawer, buried away from the world, hidden from curious eyes and dangerous encounters. Secure until this day.

  
The morning sun was still shining into his room when Charles entered it. He had peaked in first, it was Saturday and Erik valued sleeping in on Saturdays, starting them slowly with a nice breakfast around half past ten and a long walk in the garden. Charles had actually expected him to be still in bed or reading in his armchair, but the room was empty, fine dust dancing in the light that poured into the room through the windows.

Charles followed two simple rules when it came to Erik.  
One: Never enter his mind without permission and  
Two: Never enter his room without permission.  
Erik valued his privacy and he respected that. In return, Charles always left his own door a little ajar, inviting him in if he wanted to talk or offer a game of chess. He had no secrets but one, and even when it _did_ concern Erik, it wasn’t the kind of secret one would uncover in a room.

Still, that Saturday morning he had to break his rules. He could have probably just gone downstairs into his own study to fetch the opaque white there, but he was too lazy and he believed he had seen a little bottle of the cover-up on Erik’s desk last time he had been inside the room. Now that he was standing in the doorway though, the room empty before him, there was no sight of it on top of the neat desk.

Charles turned around and looked down into the corridor towards the stairs. Soft sunlight fell through the windows, but no one else was in sight. Tschaikowsky played somewhere in the house and in his mind he heared Raven laughing about a quip, the other kids joining in somewhere two floors beneth him. He gently closed the door (although not without feeling guilty) and walked behind the desk, opening the first of the three drawers.   
It held Erik’s Italian stationery, a beautiful, dark blue stylograph and a few stamps, but no opaque white. He carefully closed the drawer again and opened the middle one, which was filled with legal documents, a passport and two big folders with words Suetterlin Charles’ didn’t understand. He knew it was Suetterlin though, because no matter how hard Erik was trying, his letters would always look a bit like the German script he had been taught at school. Closing the middle drawer, Charles carefully also opened the last one, the lowest of them. It wasn’t as neatly assorted as the other two, but there was also much less inside, which made him spot the opaque white he had been looking for even before he had completely opened the drawer. As he lifted it, the bottle somehow stuck to whatever it had been placed on, some yellow paper buried beneath booklets, tealights and white sheets of paper. Charles carefully tried to separate both form each other, sitting down in Erik’s chair.

The paper crackled quietly when they came apart and Charles absentmindedly turned it around, only to be surprised by what had neatly been written down there, in a mixture of both American cursive and German Suetterlin. _Charles_  
It was an envelope. An envelope, closed but not sealed, holding several pages inside. His heart skipped one or two beats and he felt how his breath stuck in his throat before the heart that had just stood still began pounding against his ribcage and his head started to feel hot. He frowned. _Why was there a letter addressed to him in Erik’s desk?_

He was still debating putting it back into the drawer and pretending he had never found it, when his fingers started to open it, carefully unfolding the three small sheets of stationery and he began to read.

_Dear Charles,_

_I know you are angry and you have every right to rip this letter apart and burn it, but before I leave you entirely, there are a few things I would like to explain.  
Where I grew up, it would already be cold by now…_

Chales looked at the upper right corner of the first sheet, it was dated from October 1962, just days before they had left for Cuba, half a year ago.

_… my mother would prepare for the winter, I would wear a thick coat and probably walk the earth without ever knowing you existed. But I am not in Duesseldorf anymore, and I don’t want to dwell on memories for too long. I knew right from the start, that this day would come. That it would be here sooner than we would both expect it to and that I would have to turn around and walk away from you.  
Charles, this is good bye and you knew it would be. I am not certain that either of us will survive what is yet to come, although I dearly hope that you will grow old in these halls, surrounded by family and friends like you deserve it. In any way, you are either reading this because I left you or I did not come back from our excursion alive. In any case, please forgive me for intruding your room and placing this on your pillow, I wanted to make sure you would find it upon your return._

_At first I would like to say sorry for any trouble or pain I might have caused. I believe your life would have been so much less complicated without me in it and there are days that I wish you would have let me drown before either of us could grow attached to the other, before we became friends and, most important, before I wasn’t able to go to bed anymore without wishing you a good night. And that, Charles, is the actual reason I’m leaving. I am sure we could sort out all our differences concerning mutants and humans, but this is something I won’t be able to overcome. Living in the same house as you, knowing you right beside me without ever being able to actually be with you._

_I am certain you stay away from my mind most of the time, otherwise you would have long known. Charles, I love…_

He didn’t get any further then, because the door opened slowly and Erik stepped in, looking at him before seeing anything else in the room. Charles let the letter sink to look at him, his cheeks must have been flushed and his mouth slightly open. Erik's glare was on the letter in the fracture of a second and his features turned angry.

“You have no right to read that Charles!” His voice was boiling with anger, slamming thr door shut. The temperature in the room dropped a few degrees.

“Have I not then?” Charles lifted the envelope, still reading his name, “What is that supposed to be?” His voice cracked with fear, sorrow ... and love. He had read the last word of the sentence that had made his hands tremble. _I love you._ He wasn’t as alone as he had believed after all.

Erik came closer, reaching for both the letter and the envelope, tearing it away from Charles, but never answering his question.

“Erik, why did you write this?”

He still didn’t get an answer. Instead, Erik opened the door again, showing Charles to leave immediately, his glance fixed on the wooden floor underneath his feet. Charles heart was still hammering hard inside his chest, his cheeks felt hot and he wanted to cry. He had never heard or read anything this beautiful from the man across the room. The man that barely stayed with the rest of them in the living room after dinner, that preferred being left alone and usually never used many _pretty_ words.

When he thought about it now though, Erik preferred being alone, yes, but only if alone included him, the two of them over a game of chess or next to each other reading tomes about chemo genetics and Postmodern German literature. Erik almost never left the living room if there was an empty spot next to him on the couch. And he used this kind of language, not very often, but when he talked about the things that mattered to him. His mother mainly.

“Look at me would you,” Charles carefully asked, touching Erik’s arm as he stood next to him, “what makes you think you can’t be with me?” His voice was ever so soft when his hand touched Erik’s right cheek and he saw a small tear right there in the corner of his eye, that dissapeared almost immediately again.

Erik looked at him in disbelief, just for a moment, just until his face showed relief, that kind of relief Charles had only seen once, the day Erik had turned the satellite dish towards them, another battle won.

It was only small peck first, lips barely touching for the first time, eyes half closed, bending up and down to reach the other one. It was nothing more than that before it was, before hands started holding on to one another and lips parted and little sounds of joy escaped either one of them. The room was flooded with warm sunlight then and the letter had long fallen to the ground, forgotten, unimportant.

 


End file.
